checking refills

7+ Year Member

just curious...do you guys check refills against the hard copy? ive heard some people dont even look at refills. they just make sure its the right drug and bag it. most chains have a scanner so you can actually see the hard copy on the screen but what if you don't have one? I can imagine it would be very inconvenient to have to pull hard copies out of a filing cabinet every time you have to check a refill. me, personally, i always check refills because i have caught mistakes on even 2nd and 3rd fills. am i just being extra paranoid ??

10+ Year Member

just curious...do you guys check refills against the hard copy? ive heard some people dont even look at refills. they just make sure its the right drug and bag it. most chains have a scanner so you can actually see the hard copy on the screen but what if you don't have one? I can imagine it would be very inconvenient to have to pull hard copies out of a filing cabinet every time you have to check a refill. me, personally, i always check refills because i have caught mistakes on even 2nd and 3rd fills. am i just being extra paranoid ??

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With our software we scan the hard copies into our script and when we verify the refill we are able to pull up a scanned image of the hard copy. Our software is actually pretty simplistic as well, i thought most rx software would have this option available to it's users at this point. It is a great feature to have.

With that being said I dont spend a lot of time on refills, although I have caught some previous mistakes, by both myself and other pharmacists by looking really well at the hard-copy during refills.

I've caught several discrepancies on refills, but I've been told that we verify the original and the first refill, after that it's assumed any error that will be caught has been caught. Not sure how I feel about that.